GOP Congress takes marching orders from Netanyahu: Ex-US congressional staffer

The Republican-dominated Congress is taking its marching orders from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make sure there will be no deal between Iran and the P5+1 over Tehran’s nuclear energy program, an American activist and radio host in California says.

Rodney Martin, a former US Congressional staffer, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

He was commenting on the White House’s claim that the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s approval on Tuesday of bipartisan legislation to allow Congress to review a nuclear agreement with Iran is not a defeat for the Obama administration.

The so-called Iran Nuclear Amendment Review Act of 2015 should actually be called “the AIPAC Iran Nuclear Amendment Review Act of 2015,” Martin said, becase the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and “the Zionist Jewish lobby are pulling the strings of the Congress… to grasp at any straw they can to ensure that there is no agreement with Iran.”

“They are taking their marching orders from Bibi Netanyahu who made the extraordinary step of coming to Washington and giving personal marching orders to the senators themselves,” said Martin.

On Tuesday, the Foreign Relations Committee approved legislation that allows Congress to review a nuclear agreement with Iran.

US President Barack Obama had threatened to veto an initial version of the legislation, but changed his mind after some changes were made to the controversial bill.

“I think President Obama should have vetoed this bill as an encroachment on the executive branch by the legislative branch,” Martin said.  

He added that the passage of this bill shows that “the legislative branch is taking marching orders from a foreign government and serving and running roughshod over the treaty-making powers of the executive branch.”

He stated that the same power, Israel, has also spied Iran nuclear negotiations and provided sensitive information to members of Congress, but the US government has done nothing about this.

Martin said Tel Aviv’s spying has “basically revealed Israel as being a foreign enemy of the United States, and if anything, Israel should be on the terror list the Congress routinely puts out every year, [but] Congress has done nothing.”

“Every senator that received intelligence information from Israel should be subject to an FBI investigation,” the former US Congressional staffer emphasized.

He went on to say that most of the Americans as well as many Democrats and Republicans want to end America's 36 years of extreme hostility toward Iran, “with the exception of the evangelical neocons who have some sort of very perverted fetish towards the Zionist Jews, but they are a very small, but a very vocal minority.”

HDS/GJH

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